Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3) (was: RIP

Scott Helms khelms at zcorum.com
Fri May 16 16:02:03 UTC 2014


Blake,

None of those applications come close to causing symmetrical traffic
patterns and for many/most networks the upstream connectivity has greatly
improved.  Anything related to voice is no more than 80 kbps per line, even
if the SIP traffic isn't trunked (less if it is because the signaling data
is shared).  Document sharing is not being impinged, on my residential
account right now I've uploaded about 30 documents this morning including
large PDFs and Power Point presentations.

Off site back up is one use that could drive traffic, but I don't believe
that the limiting factor is bandwidth.  We looked at getting into that
business and from what we saw the limiting factor was that most residential
and SOHO accounts didn't want to pay enough to cover your storage &
management costs.  In our analysis the impact of bandwidth on the consumer
side adoption was basically zero.  There is no expectation that back ups
run instantly.  Having said all of that, even if hosted back up became
wildly popular would not change the balance of power because OTT video is
both larger, especially for HD streams, and used much more frequently.


Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
--------------------------------


On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Blake Hudson <blake at ispn.net> wrote:

>
> Jay Ashworth wrote the following on 5/16/2014 10:35 AM:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>
>>> From: "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka at seacom.mu>
>>> While that is true a lot of the time (especially for eyeball
>>> networks), it is less so now due to social media. Social
>>> media forces the use of symmetric bandwidth (like FTTH),
>>> putting even more demand on the network,
>>>
>> Oh yes; clearly, Twitter will be the end of L3.
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> Could you expand a bit, Mark on "Social media forces the use of symmetric
>> bandwidth"?  Which social media platform is it that you think has a)
>> symmetrical flows that b) are big enough to figure into transit symmetry?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -- jra
>>
> Applications like Skype and Facetime (especially conference calls) would
> be one example where an application benefits from symmetric (or asymmetric
> in favor of higher upload speed) connectivity. Cloud office applications
> like storage of documents, email, and IVR telephony also benefit from
> symmetrical connectivity. Off-site backup software is another great
> example. Most residential connections are ill suited for this. I believe
> these applications (and derivatives) would be more popular today if the
> connectivity was available.
>
> --Blake
>



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